Listening to Music Can Make Study More Effective Essay Example

Many students think that listening to music while studying helps them work more efficiently. Even though students know listening to music can lead to other distractions, they do it anyways because it makes their work seem more “enjoyable”. What should people choose? Should they risk the possibility of being distracted by listening to their favorite music, or work in silence which allows for better focus and effective studies? Listening to music is distracting to students while they are studying.

First, music can be distracting and makes students want to focus on listening music more than the task at hand. This becomes clear when Burnett states that, doing two things at once can be a disturbance to the main task. Without knowing people alter their focus on another thing. To elaborate even further, Burnett brings up the idea of how people unconsciously switch their focus to music and not the original task.

Next, music tends to be another thing to think about while learning and doing two things at once is challenging and not productive. Glenn Schellenberg, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Toronto, says, “The reason why it’s a mess is you have cognitive limitations. If you’re doing two things at once you don’t focus as well” (Schellenberg). To simplify this Schellenberg is stating that based off of his studies people can not listen to music and study at the same time because it can divert their attention towards the music and not their work. He came to the conclusion that music is not a key point to an effective studying environment. 

While it might be true that listening to classical music can make one feel relaxed and make their work more enjoyable, still music does not make one’s studying more efficient. According to Gordon Shaw’s studies, “Ten years after the theory became wildly popular, a team of researchers gathered the results from almost 40 studies conducted on the Mozart Effect, and found very little evidence that listening to classical music really does help performance of specific tasks” (Segaren). This helps to prove that students do not benefit from listening to music while studying. 

In conclusion, there can be different results of listening to music while studying, but the disadvantages far outweigh the benefits. The next time one picks up their notes to study for a test they should simply shut off the music, so they can enhance the quality of his or her studies.